


Sinking Deep

by losvcr



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Blood and Violence, Eventual Smut, F/M, M/M, Multi, This will be a wild ride, hold on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 19:04:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14700318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/losvcr/pseuds/losvcr
Summary: Nothing brings people together more than a disaster. That is, if the disaster is rectifiable. The collapsing of society, however? Nothing drives people more further apart.All of a sudden, the world is flipped upside down. The words ‘zombies’, ‘infection’, and ‘reckoning’ are spread like wildfire - almost as fast as the infection that is claiming lives left and right. The world as Richie knows it has come to an end.Traveling with his children, his best friends and other survivors, Richie is forced to leave behind everything he knows and beat the unbeatable. On this journey through hell on Earth, the last thing he expects is to run into someone who would change his life more than flesh-eating infected taking over the world; Eddie Kaspbrak.Life is different. Survival isn’t guaranteed. Everyday welcomes a new horror to deal with, sometimes facing threats worse than the infected.They will fight, but the question is: will they win?





	Sinking Deep

**Author's Note:**

> So this is part one of a zombie fic, and it is not meant for the faint of heart. Read at your own discretion! This story **will** be explicit. With that warning, please do enjoy! I've had muse for this for a long time.

“Woooow, so you really arrested an old lady? That’s like, cruel and unusual, Bev.”

Richie spoke his criticism through a mouthful of onions, tomatoes, lettuce, beef and condiment, his teeth grinding the ingredients together to create an ugly sounding crunch. This made Richie confused on whether Bev’s unimpressed gaze she shot in his direction was due to his obnoxious eating or his censure.

“Richie, she let her feral dog off its leash so that it could attack another person. She endangered the safety of those around her.” Bev scoffed, her eyes turning back to the road in front of her. “I took an oath--”

Richie rolled his eyes as Bev started and was quick to cut in after swallowing his mouthful. “Yeah, yeah. I know this spiel. I’m just messin’ with ya, Bev. I can’t actually be mean to the person who bought me this mouth-watering burger. S’all I’m saying.”

Richie stared out of his window as he ate, watching as they began to leave out of the fast-paced city full of tall skyscrapers and congested architecture towards suburbia. Bev would drop him off at home, they would dress out of their work attire, and then they would meet up with Stan at their local bar. It wasn’t usual for their schedules to line up like that, especially with Bev being a cop for the LAPD, but when it did, they took full advantage of it.

Richie’s eyes were glued to the traditional, middle-class homes of the neighborhood they drove in, and he found himself thankful his job was well-paying. His own house cost him a fortune, but being a radio DJ while doing odd jobs on the side allowed him to get by decently. He wasn’t exactly responsible all the time (in fact, most of the time he wasn’t), but he had more than enough people around him who cared about him to keep him on track.

In the middle of another bite, he nearly choked when the car came to a sudden and neck-breaking halt, his burger flying out of his hands. “Beverly!” Was his instinctual yelp, bits of food flying past his lips. It wasn’t until his head whipped forward that he understood exactly why his friend stopped.

In the middle of the road, a bizarre act was taking place. The car had to have stopped about 10 yards away from what was happening - a woman was lying on the ground, her body violently twitching and her hand outstretched in the direction of the car as if reaching for something or someone. Richie’s eyes involuntarily trailed down, and he felt his stomach drop and a wave of nausea hit him when he saw the amount of blood spreading from her body and onto the gravel road. That wasn’t what most horrified him, however.

What was most horrifying was why she was so ghastly injured. Hands dug deep inside of the woman’s splayed-open abdomen, only to draw back up with fistfuls of deep red blood and guts. The hands didn’t throw or drop the viscera, however. Instead, the hands raised until it met with a wide open mouth, stuffing the gore inside and chewing. Richie couldn’t hear how it sounded, but the way the mouth chewed gave him the grisly thought of it sounding squishy and wet. Blood and spit dripped from the jowls and back down into the cavity of the now-motionless woman.

The hands belonged to a man dressed in a business suit that was now covered in blood, his face pale and inhuman. Richie didn’t even know if he could consider that thing a person. It jerked disturbingly with every movement and devoured the woman as if it had been starved of food for months.

Richie could feel bile rising up his throat, threatening to spill at any moment. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. All he could do was stare at the scene with wide, petrified eyes.

In his head, he had to wonder just how long they had been sitting there in stunned silence, unable to move and only able to stare. He had to wonder it, because he soon heard a door swinging open and saw Beverly’s slender frame quickly and defensively approaching the scene, her gun drawn.

Something was too wrong with this, and Richie could feel his protective side kicking in as he unbuckled his seatbelt and pushed his own car door open. He knew he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if something bad happened to Beverly.

Right as he exited the car, he heard Beverly yelling out several repeated commands in a fierce tone that would have the toughest of men trembling. The man wasn’t eating anymore, but was now on his feet and approaching Beverly quickly as if he hadn’t heard a word she said, letting out ear-piercing shrieks that caused Richie’s toes to involuntarily curl.

“Stop! That’s an order! I’m warning you! Stop! Stop!”  _BOOM_.

Richie’s body rattled and his ears rung as the bullet flew into the man’s chest, flatten him over onto the ground mere feet away from Beverly. “Holy shit!” He cursed out with wide eyes, unable to believe that the man hadn’t stopped. Then again, was there really any rationale to expect out of a man who consumed entrails eagerly? There was only a moment of hesitance before Richie finally rushed over to Beverly who was doubled over onto her knees, breathing shallow. “Are you okay...?”

He rubbed her back gently, waiting for an answer and doing his best to avoid looking at the calamity in front of them. Richie knew that if he looked, his concern would take an unwanted backseat to unadulterated fear. He saw Beverly open her mouth to say something, either to answer his question or demand for him to get back in the car, but she suddenly stopped and stared straight ahead. It was the alarm that crossed over her features that had Richie turning his head to see what was wrong, and chills ran down his spine once he realized what had Beverly so shaken up.

The man was still moving. In fact, the man was slowly pushing up from his hands and eventually stumbling to his feet, groaning in a way that seemed bestial. There was just no way. Once the thing that Richie realized absolutely wasn’t human straightened up and turned around to face them again, that loud, unnatural shrieking had Richie recoiling before it rushed them once more.

Richie yelped out in shock, reflexively backing away, but abruptly stopped when another loud ‘BOOM’ resounded. The bullet lodged in its head, and once it hit the concrete again, it stopped moving completely.

Silence filled the air for a few long, tense moments.

“What the  _fuck_?”

Richie whispered it, his whole body trembling. This couldn’t be real. This wasn’t happening.

He couldn’t help but look around, trying to see if they were really the only people who were out there. Beverly fired off  _two_ shots in the span of a minute, and yet, his eyes saw no witnesses around them. Not even a curious head poking out through a door or frightened eyes peeping through closed curtains. The odds of them being alone was slim, but it sure felt like they were.

He caught Beverly’s shaking hands lower the gun when she was certain it was dead, and she turned around to stare at him with wide, worried eyes. It was a look Richie didn’t want to see at that moment. He wanted Beverly to have some sort of explanation for what the fuck just happened, but he could see she was just as lost and as shaken up as he was. Before he could fruitlessly ask if Beverly was okay again, her small, but firm voice spoke first.

“Richie, get back in the car... I’m taking you home.”

He honestly didn’t need to be told twice. In the car was where it felt safe.

He wanted to get away from the smell of metallic iron. He wanted to get away from the palpable tension in the air. He wanted to get away from the fear and the uncertainty.

Once back in the car, Beverly tried to call back into headquarters, but the lines were all busy or silent. No matter how many different times she tried to reach out with a code, or call for backup, she didn’t receive an answer. Despite not wanting to leave the scene, Beverly drove off. They both could tell that something bad was happening and that they had to keep moving.

Richie tried for 911 on his cellphone, but even with the times he got through, the call would abruptly disconnect. He could feel his internal panic starting to build up and peek through, still unable to get the image of that woman out of his head. Of that  _thing_.

Beverly had driven fast, and it was only five minutes later that they pulled up to his house, thankfully not having stumbled upon another grisly scene. It made Richie hope that maybe it was a one-off. Maybe whatever was wrong with that guy was now eliminated and that everything would go back to normal.

Even with that hope, Richie knew it was exiguous. The air was still thick with tension, and the world seemed to have permanently shifted.

When they pulled into his driveway, Richie was surprised to see Stan’s car parked on the side of the street in front of his house and Stan pacing back and forth outside of his house. That was odd, as they had planned on meeting at the bar in an hour. Stan being there didn’t give him a good feeling at all.

Richie was quick to hop out as soon as Beverly came to a stop, briskly approaching his fearful looking friend.

“What did you see?” Richie asked almost immediately once reaching Stan, his body tense as he waited for an answer. He didn’t know that he actually wanted an answer, feeling that it would only confirm the nightmare.

Beverly joined them, the same frown from when her attempts to reach the HQ failed still etched onto her face. “I.. I know it probably sounds crazy, but I saw.. I saw...”

Stan stumbled over his words, clearly having a difficult time expressing what he witnessed. Richie understood. Hell, Richie was trying to erase what he saw from his memory.

“Someone attacking another person, trying to kill them. Trying to...” Stan trailed off, his eyebrows furrowed in frustration as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say next. “ _Eat_  them.”

Unable to help it, a humorless choked laugh fell past Richie’s lips and he forced a hand through his curls. “Are we seriously having some sort of zom--”

“Don’t you dare say it!” Beverly cut in vehemently, seemingly having the same meltdown and gripping at her own her fiery hair. “This.. this is fucking crazy. This isn’t happening. We live in a world with police and military and government. There’s no way an outbreak-- Just, what the fuck?”

Richie felt like he was in a movie. How was this even possible? He always joked about being prepared for the zombie apocalypse “just in case” because anything could happen, but he never took himself seriously. He couldn’t help but beat himself up a little, jealously thinking about how somebody else probably actually followed through and prepared themselves for this situation - they probably had an underground bunker, weapons, and food to last them for months, while he longingly wished to be there with them. He wasn’t prepared for this shit, especially if Bev and Stan, the most stable people he knew, were just as freaked as he was.

He soon began to think about what the fuck they had to do now that he felt fairly sure they were witnessing the start of an apocalypse, and that was when his heart dropped, a gasp of horror lodging in his throat.

His kids.

As if on cue, his phone began to ring, playing out “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” by The Temptations, and after fumbling with getting the damn phone out of his jean pocket, he answered within a second. Before he could even think about getting anything out, he heard loud screaming on the other line from multiple voices, and his whole entire body froze. He felt like he could die in that moment.

“Dad! H-help us! There’s-- Oh my god-- Dad we need help!” The shrill, tear-stricken and trembling voice on the other line was unmistakable. It was the voice of his thirteen year old daughter, Raine.

“Baby girl, what’s going on? Where are you?!”

Richie was doing his best not to have a panic attack, something becoming quickly and increasingly difficult. Everyone knew that his twins were his pride and joy, and he had been there every step of the way in their lives thus far. They were his entire world. To hear the fear in his daughter’s voice was too much for his frayed nerves to handle.

He received no answer right away, instead, hearing loud banging as well as the loud screaming from another female voice - it had to be Emerson. There was suddenly shuffling in the background, causing the phone to break out into muted junctures. Just when he was going to yell for his daughter again, she was stammering out again.

“H-home! The neighbors, th-they’re trying to h-hurt us... m-mom got a knife, b-but it looks like--”

Instead of finishing, Raine screamed again, and Richie heard the distinctive sound of glass shattering in the background. Then, there was a click and silence.

Richie was frozen, utter terror filling his body. He could barely process what he’d just listened to. “Ray..? Raine?!”

“Richie, what’s going on?” Bev asked with a deep frown, her hand twitching next to her gun on the holster in a way that seemed like she was ready to jump into action at any moment.

Richie didn’t answer right away, trading out his phone for his keys and striding over to his car. “Get in your cruiser and turn on your lights - we need to get to Emerson’s house  _now_.”

The one thing Richie loved about his relationship with his two best friends was that they worked seamlessly together. It was like their brains became one sometimes, and they all just knew what to do and when to do it. The gravity of the situation didn’t seem lost on any of them and they moved as a unit, no questions asked. Sometimes Richie thought they could form their own little vigilante justice group until Beverly started going on about that damn  _oath_.

It didn’t matter now, though. He knew it didn’t once he watched Beverly quickly jogging towards her car in response to his orders.

Raine and Reece were his children, but Bev and Stan were like their aunt and uncle. The bonds were practically familial, so Richie had no doubt his friends would die protecting his children - hell, he remembered Beverly drunkenly admitting that very notion. Words just didn’t need to be exchanged to know that this matter was urgent, and that time was of the essence.

Stan got in the passenger seat of Richie’s car silently, giving Richie a firm nod once they settled down. The moment Beverly’s sirens sounded, Richie tore out of his driveway and followed closely behind Beverly who was driving like a bat out of hell towards their destination.

They had looped back around to drive towards the city again, and the eerie tranquility of the neighborhood was slowly shifting into chaos the closer they drove towards the city. Richie could see people running and packing their cars, a sense of panic suffocating the air. Oddly enough, it felt better than the terrifying perception of being alone he had earlier with the previous encounter.

Maybe the panicking around him made it all feel less like a dream and more like the reality that it was.

“Richie, remember those protests and riots a few days ago when the police shot an unarmed man?”

Richie listened to Stan’s question, and he thought about it. “Yeah? What about it..?”

Richie took a glance over at Stan who had his phone pulled out, slightly startled by the grim look on his face. Richie just knew that his friend was about to drop a bombshell.

“The man had been running around biting people.”

The statement loomed in the air. It was indicative of just how fucked they all were.

Richie didn’t have time to respond or further question his friend about what he was reading once they neared Emerson’s home. Her front door bore signs of damage, though not enough to break it. All it did was make Richie’s body shudder, and he had to stop himself from jumping out of his own moving vehicle to get to his children.

He didn’t hesitate once their cars parked parallel to the house, grabbing his bat from the backseat and jumping out in one smooth motion. Richie’s lanky frame carried him forward quickly and nimbly until he was stopped in front of the front door, ear pressed against the wood and straining to hear... anything, really. He couldn’t hear anything, however, and it frustrated him.

Richie felt a gentle hand on his shoulder, his head turning right as Beverly stepped up next to him. She motioned with two fingers towards the back of the house in a nonverbal cue that Richie understood, his eyes watching her slender frame lithely disappeared around the side of the home. As soon as Stan came up next to him, Richie took in a deep breath as he began to twist the doorknob, feeling a knot of dread in his stomach when it clicked and the door began to creak open.

He didn’t know what he would see on the other side and it terrified him. Richie had a strong feeling that what he was walking in on would traumatize him, so much so that he felt his heart would pump out of his chest from the amount of anxiety he felt.

He was right.

The door gently hit the wall when he swung it open the last bit, and Richie’s body felt like lead when he saw what was happening.

A defiled body laid dead on the ground, surrounded by.. the Garrisons? Richie knew those faces. Those were the faces of neighbors, just as Raine clarified, who would stop by the cookouts. Their daughters would come over and play with Raine. The man of the household would always wave at him whenever he pulled up to pick his kids up for the weekend.

They weren’t human anymore.

That wasn’t what horrified him most, though. It was that he  _recognized_  the body on the ground.

It was Emerson. The mother of his children.

A knife was on the ground right next to her desecrated corpse, stained with blood. Richie could tell she had put up a fight, but with the four bodies consuming her remains, there was no way that was ever gonna be a winning battle.

He barely had time to process his shock, grief, and horror over the scene before he heard a mixture of inhuman groans and the familiar spine-tingling shrieks pointed in their direction.

Richie stepped in front of Stan who didn’t have a weapon, trying to ignore the terror he felt as three out of the four things stumbled to their feet, sights set on them. If it hadn’t been for the overpowering drive to figure out what happened to his children, Richie would have fled the moment he realized they were outnumbered. He had maybe one good hit with his bat before being overwhelmed, but it was a risk he was willing to take.

John, or the thing that used to be John, was the first one to take off in their direction. The speed it moved was frightening, and Richie almost didn’t have time to raise his bat. He didn’t get a chance to swing, though. Not before he heard a loud bang and one last guttural shriek as the thing flew to the ground in front of his feet, giving several small twitches before it finally stilled.

Wide eyes darted up to watch just as Beverly fired another round, and then another. The only one left was the one still hunched over Emerson’s corpse, seemingly oblivious or willfully ignoring the loud gunshots.

It was finally then that Richie’s frustration and sorrow grabbed a hold of him, morphing into full-fledged anger. He and Emerson hadn’t been close. Their short lived relationship was fiery and they were entirely incompatible. They wouldn’t have even been on speaking terms if it hadn’t been for her pregnancy that was revealed right after their break-up. That still didn’t mean he wasn’t upset about her gruesome and untimely death. She  _was_  the mother of his kids who were his entire world, after all.

It was why he charged forward with a yell, the barrel of his metal bat colliding hard with the face of the zombie wife, Margaret; his bat connected with a dull, but loud ‘crack’. The creature went flying to the ground with a dying rumble in its throat, but it didn’t last as he smashed his bat down over and over again. Even when it stopped moving, Richie continued to bring the bat down over its mangled face. It wasn’t until he felt strong arms rush forward and wrap around his that he allowed his bloodied bat to clatter to the ground, slightly melting into Stan’s hold. Richie wasn’t entirely sure when tears started falling.

“Richie... are you--”

Beverly stopped short, all of their heads snapping at attention at the sound of sudden, consistent banging. Richie could feel his heart skip a beat when he heard it.

It was the muffled cries of his children.

None of them hesitated. They all ran in the direction of the voices, stopping in front of the door down the hallway that had a chair shoved underneath the doorknob. Beverly kicked it out of the way, and Richie was the one to bust inside of the room, nearly hitting his daughter who dodged the door just in time.

“Dad!”

The tears cascading down his cheeks only fell faster when he felt Raine collide into his body, shaking and sobbing while holding onto him like he was a lifeline. It was only seconds later when he felt the body of his boy crash into his, clinging on just as tightly.

“Shh, it’s o-okay... I’m here.” He soothed as best as he could, his free hand switching between stroking both of their dark hair.

Richie felt like he could hold onto his twins for an eternity. They were safe. They weren’t harmed - not physically, anyway, and that was enough for him at that moment.

“Richie, we gotta get out of here.” Stan prompted gently, slowly making his way over to the family and placing a hand on top of Richie’s shoulder.

Stan was right, Richie knew. They had to get out of there. Whatever was happening wasn’t something that could be fixed. He hadn’t been imagining the permanent shift in the air.

This was a situation of survival, now.

As Richie looked down at his crying and shaken up children, he understood that he would fight through whatever was happening. He would do it for them. He would do it for his friends.

He was determined to make sure they lived.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you guys think!


End file.
